Posts Tagged ‘SHA256 ASIC’

Bitmain is apparently setting a very ambitious goal of their new miner called AntMiner R4 and that goal is to bring back home mining of Bitcoin. What they are doing in order to get home miners’ attention is trying to make the miner more compact and less noisy while still managing to provide quite a serious hashrate rated at 8.6 THS with just about 845 W of power usage. What will make the most difference for home users however is the price of the new miner and if it is not right, then why would you bring one or even more of these home, guess we’ll know in a few days as sales start at 23:00 (GMT+8) on 29 August when we’ll probably also get an idea about the price of the device.

One of the most interesting things that you will notice with this miner is the cooling fan it uses, Bitmain calls is “a groundbreaking custom-design fan” that is intended to reduce the noise coming from the miner. Instead of using traditional computer fans (designed for servers) that are not intended to be silent, but instead to do their job providing good cooling they have opted out for a different design for the R4’s cooling. The fan that Bitmain uses in the AntMiner R4 is apparently inspired by the fan of a silent split air conditioner, so it was designed to make less than half the noise of the standard miner fan. Furthermore the rotational speed is being automatically controlled to ensure it never creates more noise than is absolutely necessary to keep the miner cool and running, so the noise will also depend on the ambient temperature.

Bitmain will be also offering an optional custom-built PSU for further noise reduction to go along with the AntMiner R4 – the Bitmain APW5. The power supply works with both 220V and 110V (the standard in North America) input to deliver 2600W and 1300W, respectively. It has a dynamically controlled fan that runs at full speed only after heat sink temperature is 80°C. The Bitmain APW5 should start selling along with the Antmier R4 miner in a couple of days, do note that this is a 12V only power supply that is capable of delivering a very good efficiency of up to 93%. So it may be a great choice to go along with the R4, unless of course you already have some spare 1 KW or more computer power supplies sitting idle.

BitMain has listed the upcoming ~500 GHS AntMiner S3 Bitcoin ASIC miner on their website based on the new 28nm BM1382 chips that were recently announced. The AntMiner S3 should start shipping from July 10th with a price set at 0.75 BTC, so you can already pre-order your unit if you are interested. The initial effective hash rate for the S2 was announced to be 504 GHS plus/minus 5% and now it seem that Bitmain has lowered it a bit to 478 GHS, though the unit should be overclockable to 500 GHS or more. The power consumption for the 500 GHS hashrate that was previously announced was 390W on wall and now with the official hashrate lowered a bit the power usage is also a bit lower at 366 Watt.

Do note that the BitMain AntMiner S3 ships without a PSU. There are 4 PCI-e connectors for +12V DC input, but it apparently needs only two of them to be connected if you are not going to be overclocking the device, so the other two are required only if you do plan to overclock the device.

BitMain and their 55nm BM1380 SHA256 ASIC chip and the miners that the company has released based on it are quite popular and now the company has announced that they are ready with their new 28nm ASIC chip – the BM1382. As you can already guess the new chips will be offering higher performance at a lower power consumption, so you can get more powerful miners with the same size and power usage as the previous generation with the help of the new chips. The track record of the company is so far very good thanks to the fact that they are not using pre-orders, but ship from stock and announce products when they are ready for shipping, so you can get them fast at a good price and start hashing right away.

BM1382 has achieved 15.75 Gh/s in hash performance, consuming less than 9.33 W on chip level at 0.75V. This means 0.59 J/GH on chip. If the core voltage is at 0.63V, the efficiency will be 0.40 J/GH on chip. BM1382 will bring the power efficiency of Bitcoin mining industry to a new level which has not been massively achieved before. BM1382 represents a 20% power saving on its previous generation of 55nm chips and nearly 10 times of better physical densification, which will further improve the safety of the decentralized ecosystem.

The first devices that we already expect to be available, probably by the end of this month, from BitMain based on the new BM1382 ASIC chips will be the AntMiner S3 miners. Devices, that will follow the design of the very popular AntMiner S1 blade miner. According to BitMain each S3 should be using 32 BM1382 chips and be able to provide a hashrate of 504 GHS with a power consumption of about 390W from the wall. So this is close to almost 3 times the hashrate of the old S1 with pretty much the same power consumption, not bad at all, but we also need to see this coupled with an attractive price. The new S3 miners have the potential to become a great option for smaller miners that want to be able to mine Bitcoin or other SHA-256 crypto currencies.

We don’t know what the exact price will be, but considering that the company is able to offer 1 THS miner based on the 55nm older chips for a price of $1850 USD at the moment, the half of that hashrate and smaller and easier to produce new AntMiner S3 ASIC miners should be not more than lets say $750 USD, but that is actually a bit expensive. They need to be sold at a price of about 1 BTC or even less in order to become really more interesting for the users and to offer a foreseeable return of investment and some profit for the miners.

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